


Six Years in the Harzwald

by fangnominous



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Action/Adventure, Germany, Harry Potter Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Horror, M/M, Magical Worldbuilding, Multi, Psychological Horror, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-18
Updated: 2018-06-17
Packaged: 2019-05-24 20:01:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14961233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fangnominous/pseuds/fangnominous
Summary: After the war's end, a psychologically damaged Harry flees England for mainland Europe, searching for purpose. He finds something else entirely. Trouble, inevitably, follows.





	Six Years in the Harzwald

**Author's Note:**

> Updates will be slow. Rating will increase by chapter. This is likely to be long, and extremely strange, so watch your step.

**I.**

  Harry awoke one morning, about a month and a half after the Battle of Hogwarts was won, to find that his will to live had vacated him.

  It had vanished suddenly, disappeared beyond the asymptotic horizon of a train station bathed in white, that unreachable boundary between here and somewhere else. Together, he and his mutual enemy Lord Voldemort had followed the narrow path of prophecy for years, slowly but inevitably converging upon that same unmoving horizon.

 Perhaps it was odd, but Harry had grown accustomed to their mutual enmity over the years, and the unspoken laws that had defined it. Harry had never contemplated what would become of him when his enemy finally vanished beyond the distant gates of eternity. For a time, he was certain he would vanish, too, into that same peaceful eventuality.

  Then abruptly as it began, it seemed, eternity had ended.

  In disbelief, Harry at first withdrew to watch for signs. From a dusty, sleepless study in Grimmauld Place, he searched through countless tomes and foreign newspapers for months and months on end. The stacks grew higher than he was tall, and yet, he found no omen of his enemy’s lingering existence within them. Harry half-expected to wake one night to a prickling in his scar, only to see his fated nemesis looming over him, ready to raise his wand and fling a bright green curse directly at his heart, but sleepless night after night on end, he awoke and found only shadows.

  After half a year of searching and waiting, Harry accepted that he was alone and unpursued.

  Deluded, tired, and devoid of purpose, he withdrew further into the old manor house’s undusted depths, far from the bustling magical streets and torchlit castle walls that had previously defined his existence. It was there, against the grimy wall of a narrow corridor baring a tapestry of the Black family’s lineage dating to the time of Merlin, that he allowed himself to truly think for the first time that he could remember. During the endless meditations that followed—days or weeks long, it made little difference—he began to feel as if his soul itself were sinking through the threadbare weft and weave that showed the birth of Magic.

  When he closed his eyes to that still place between dreams and reality, he could almost see his most ancient ancestor wandering in the woods of a far-off country, a place where the winds waken unnatural voices, and the thrum of earth untouched by man beneath his feet beat out the rhythm of a song of a peace he would be born too late to know.

Harry spent hours, days, weeks drifting in a fugue state between escapism and despair, disconnected from the physical pains of tiredness or hunger, his musings broken only by his intimate acquaintance with rage. 

After a time, the frequency of his sudden anger—at the world, at Voldemort, at himself—obtunded its jarring intrusiveness, and he allowed it to participate in his meditations. 

Harry thought long and hard on that rage, how it had ensconced the whole of his being, how his longing for the recompense of his enemy’s death had nearly driven him to madness, and now that death had claimed him, how the aimlessness of his anger had metamorphosed into something far worse than guilt. 

  In doing so, Harry realized that he loved his anger, and the madness it had nearly brought upon him, and that up until that moment of revelation, the emptiness of his rage had carried him further than all the magic in his soul ever could.

  But where, precisely, had it carried him to? Now void of everything inside himself except his desire to think and reflect, Harry saw, for the first time and with bleak clarity, the rules that had been laid out for him and his enemy to follow along their prophesied journey—that all of Voldemort’s failures would be of his own making, that his very nature would never allow him to end his pursuit, and the only abiding wound Harry would receive from it all would be the scar on his forehead that marked their shared point of departure.

  He wondered if any of those rules would still have applied if either of them had chosen to do nothing at all.

  Harry had learned from Hermione about Tantalus, and of his endless punishment beneath the tree of Tartarus. He wondered if Tantalus knew that the fruit he reached for contained more of his identity than his body did. He wondered if he was Tantalus.

  He thought about the old house’s dusty emptiness, and the way the floorboards warped from lack of varnish.

  He wondered if he was like the house.

  He wondered if he was like Lord Voldemort.

  He wondered if he was anything at all anymore.

  All Harry knew for certain was that he was no longer angry.

 

**II.**

   Leaving was painless, and it was almost disappointing. 

In hindsight, Harry hardly remembers the actual leaving. After awhile, it was difficult to remember much of anything.

  He remembers the three short-lived hugs at the magical terminal of King’s Cross and the extra handful of tears that had outlined Ginny’s goodbye. He remembers his hands holding onto the handle of his trunk so tight that his knuckles lost most of their color, and how the sting of his palms against the weight of it was one of the most intense sensations he could recall experiencing in months. He dragged it, without magic, through the sliding doors of the train and further, until his fingers began to tingle.

   He didn’t look back to see if Ron and Hermione were still standing behind him. He didn’t have to turn around to know for sure. They were waiting until he disappeared. He could feel it.

   Harry remembers falling asleep with his forehead pressed to the window after emerging from the tunnel into France, and waking up to the tip-tapping of the rain in the evening as he crossed the border into Italy. It kissed him hello through the high windows of the train station at Roma Termini as he followed the throngs of other witches and wizards through the hidden archway of the platform. It was a rare windy day and the raindrops slid sideways as they rushed off the window of the southbound 23 line to wizarding Rome. Harrumphing pedestrians bustled out of the bus’ path as the driver sped over the bridge, like he knew that Harry had been waiting for days, months, years… or perhaps he, too, was in a hurry to get to a place he could call home; Harry couldn’t tell the difference.

  He remembers catching sight of himself in the window of an Apothecary south of the wall that separated the magical sector of the city just off of the Basilica of Saint Paul. His hair was such a mess. His normally wild curls, much longer after months of personal neglect, had formed a knot on top of his head, the few that had escaped the rat’s nest falling limp to frame his unusually gaunt face.

  In the reflection, his four eyes caught the purplish shadows of the towering stone turrets that lined the narrow magical alleyways, the torchlight sparkling off of the damp sidewalks like gold. He tried hard not to blink. He didn’t want to miss any part of his introduction to magical life on the continent. But he felt like he had been asleep for such a long, long time—a sleep he had fallen into unbidden, so long before his nap on the train—that he could hold onto none of it. Unaccustomed to wanting to remember, details slipped through his mind like silt through a sieve.

  After half a dozen blocks and left-hand turns down dead-end streets, he found Ghibellina Nuova and his hotel. He remembers stepping onto the rain-soaked red tile floor of the lobby with a new numbness in his legs; they refused to feel the ground in the beginning, nor his feet the hard, uneven cobblestone through the cheap hand-me-down sneakers he no longer had the presence of self to replace. It didn’t seem tangible, an the two of them were the first to notice. They were in disbelief like the rest of him.

  He remembers the first few weeks of getting lost and wet as he made his way northward through Italy into Switzerland. Every night it seemed the clouds would cry and match his tears drop for drop as he mourned a place that was no longer home. They’d fall to disguise his, and he never found a way to properly thank them for that. 

Walks were long, and rarely for a reason. He’d pass stranger after stranger, Muggle and mage alike. Sometimes their eyes would meet briefly and their heads nod in silent greeting, and it was a rush of anonymity Harry wasn’t used to. How quickly he forgot that no one knew him there, and it as easier to be brave when all they had were seconds. They’d briefly interact and then disappear again before they had a chance to ask anything of him.

  As winter began to set in, Harry passed into Germany, and it wasn’t so bad then. Mostly, Harry remembers, it was beautiful. The dark paving stones turned white and the bleak trees turned lovely, peaceful, and heavy with fresh flakes. He remembers the owls sweeping down the road and past the front door of pub that adorned the bottom storey of his hostel, their wings beating frantically to get them back home because their downy coats were always less than they needed in the harsh cold. A few carried letters for him; even fewer carried letters back. He remembers holding cups filled with anything he could find to keep himself warm and awake. And he remembers slipping into the cheap, rickety bed next to the window, with inches left open to the outside. He liked to let in a little of the frozen air and the soft drones of the boat horns as they drifted down the lapping banks of the icy Main. The combination formed an unexpected gentleness that could hum him to sleep every time.

  Harry also remembers missing things; things he thought he had already burned into distant memory, like the sound of the Dursleys’ garage tapping shut, and the smell of the ocean by Fleur and Bill’s shell cottage, and the stubborn turn of his broom handle during a Quidditch match. He remembers missing the look of the empty streets of Hogsmeade in the autumn and the way the shops would tuck themselves in on Saturdays long before the rest of them were ready to return to the castle. He remembers missing the smell of treacle tart after meals in the Great Hall and the year-round freckles that used to sprinkle themselves over Ginny’s skin. He remembers missing long showers after Quidditch practice, and long train rides piled with friends and chocolate frogs, and fresh-cut flowers from his Aunt’s garden that used to decorate the kitchen table he was never allowed to sit at. And he remembers missing familiar voices waiting for him in a firelit living room.

  He’d miss his anger, too, occasionally, but then an unfamiliar voice from an unfamiliar wizard would penetrate the crack in his window in an unfamiliar language, and he’d remember where he was. 

He remembers that there was a reason why he left.

 

**III.**

“Weren’t you scared to leave home all by yourself?” The witch on the barstool next to him, who was quickly becoming an acquaintance, whispered the question in heavily-accented English, like she was trying to keep a secret.

Harry took a breath, but it felt too shallow, and then his eyes left hers. They turned away to stare down at his new grey leather boots, one of which he was nervously kicking against the wood paneling of the bar. They must have been untied that whole time but he hadn’t noticed. He watched his feet as the nervous one slowed it jittery kicking and he took his time to answer.

“No,” Harry said, “not really.” And it was honest enough, so he raised his mug back to his lips and they continued drinking in the amiable quiet.

**Author's Note:**

> Visit me on Tumblr @fangnominous. Thank you for reading!


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